Holiday Blues
by handsomelawbringer
Summary: Before they were SPARTAN-IIs, they were kids. After they were SPARTAN-IIs, they were adults. But regardless of before and after, they were human first and foremost and sometimes John needed Kelly to remind him to come up for air. Shameless fluff.


Game: Halo

Pairing: John/Kelly

Genre: Friendship/Romance

Rating: T

A/N: It occurred to me that no one writes about kid!John and kid!Kelly. So here's a story about kid!John and kid!Kelly.

Holiday Blues

John blinked as Kelly pressed her lips to his. They were warm despite the cold, her pale cheeks flushed a delicate pink.

It was a chaste, innocent act. John had been kissed before by playmates, in the way that children go about such things, playing house with their friends, copying expressions of affection they had witnessed shared amongst the older kids and adults.

John had always been ahead of the other children his age in terms of physical prowess and mental acuity, so he himself had never bothered to initiate such a tender display; he had seen his parents kiss before, and it seemed not right to treat such a thing so flippantly, even if just for a game of make believe.

But there was something different about this, this kiss with Kelly.

He couldn't put a finger on what, but the warmth of her breath against his frozen face and pressure of her mouth against his was right in a way that nothing had been right since he'd first laid eyes on Dr. Halsey.

Just as quickly as the kiss had started, it ended, Kelly drawing back so quickly that John stumbled forward. Kelly laughed— _really_ laughed—as he caught himself before tumbling into a snowbank, the cold, dark world that they were in suddenly very real once more.

John couldn't help but crack a smile at the lightness in Kelly's eyes, the full moon above sending shafts of light through the snow-heavy clouds above. The wind stirred, rustling skeletal branches as an animal of some sort cried in the distance. Somewhere out there in the night Sam and Linda were looking for them; perhaps they had found the rest of the SPARTAN-IIs, perhaps they hadn't. Being the leader, John should have probably cared, and he did, but right then—

"Merry Christmas."

John blinked again.

"Huh?"

Kelly smiled and pointed up to where the stars would have been had it not been for the weather's stubborn desire to prove meteorologists wrong. John followed her direction, his breath coming out in puffs as he breathed deeply. His lungs burned and the air hurt his face, but he wanted to remember this moment for some reason.

"Out there...somewhere...on some planet...it's Christmas."

 _Christmas..._

John felt his eyes lose focus and he made a half-attempt at forcing them back to clarity, but then the smell of heavily seasoned, cooking fowls tickled his nose. His dad's deep voice rippled around the trees, followed by hearty laughter that seemed to shake the snow from the trees above, and he was being pulled back into a comforting embrace, rich vanilla-coconut scent soap enveloping him in a cocoon of safety and security—

" _John."_ He heard his mother say as she pressed something into his small hands. _"Merry Christmas."_

John looked down, searching for the present—the mother—that wasn't there, and for a second he was afraid he was going to black out as the searing agony of loss rippled through his gut. He missed his mother. He missed his father, too, of course, but he missed his mother so, so much.

Why was he there? What was he doing on Reach? Why had he been taken from his home, his mother? It wasn't fair. It wasn't right.

But then Kelly was there again, her hands filling the void left by the phantom present and he understood why he was there, why he was doing this, why if Dr. Halsey had walked away from him that day and never returned he would have torn the galaxy apart searching for her, the question "Why? Why not me?" his eternal torment.

And so he took Kelly's hands in his, frostbitten as they were, and held onto them tight, because Dr. Halsey was right about him, because Dr. Halsey was right about Kelly, because Dr. Halsey was right about having chosen them. And he knew why Kelly had said, "Merry Christmas", why she had reminded him of what they'd lost, of what they had been given, of why she had brought up a holiday now of all times.

"Merry Christmas."

oOOo

Kelly blinked as John pressed his lips to hers. They were warm despite the cold stale recycled air that pumped throughout the ship, his deathly pale cheeks tinged with a light dusting of red.

It was a passionate yet innocent act. Kelly had been kissed before by John, in the way that adults go about such things when their desires are stirring in their gut, laying down to affirm physically what they feel for one another emotionally.

Kelly had always been on equal footing with John in this regard, their thoughts aligning perfectly in a way she didn't know was humanly possible.

But there was something different about this, about this kiss with John.

She couldn't put a finger on what, but the warmth of his breath against her scarred face and pressure of his mouth against hers was right in a way that nothing had been right since she thought she'd lost John to the stars on those damnable Halos.

Instead of drawing back—they were in someone else's bunk for God's sake—John pushed forward, his large hands digging into her back, pressing her flush against him. There was nothing sexual about the act, not this time, but something else, something that transcended the physical plane.

"Merry Christmas," he murmured briefly before plunging back into the kiss and Kelly was suddenly a little girl again in the snowy mountains of Reach with a much shorter and younger John. The snow was falling and the moon was shining, and it struck her how fantastically similar every planet was, how her birthplace was not so different than this one, that someday there might be houses where they were standing, that someday they wouldn't need children like her to go and fight in some terrible war.

It was easy to forget that, sometimes. That they were all children. That they were _human_. John, the stresses of leadership already carving deep lines in his still-cherubic face, forgot that more than any of them.

It was just the two of them as she kissed him, as she wished him a merry Christmas, as she told him with actions rather than words that she was here, that she saw him, that he was not alone.

That memory had been one of her favorites throughout the stretches they had been apart. Many things had changed over the years—augmentations, deaths, aliens, glassings—but many things hadn't.

John was still John, Kelly was still Kelly, and they were both still alive and they were both still human.

And so she took John's face in her hands and gently maneuvered him onto his back, trespassing in someone else's bunk though they were, because John was right, because Kelly was right, because they were right together.

"Merry Christmas."


End file.
